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Monday, 12 February 2018

Three very undemocratic (and uncool) things happening right now in NZ

Despite
being busy saving the heart and soul of the National party in the last few
weeks (no that’s ok, no thanks needed) three other things caught my attention
which I am not down with.

First up is the
proposed Waka-jumping bill which is currently slithering its way through parliament.

Despite newly
minted Attorney-General, David Parker, saying it will have a “chilling effect”
on MPs this extremely anti-democratic piece of legislation may actually make it
through the house and be passed into law, although not with National or Green
support by the look of things.

And it’s clear that
this is one of the prices Labour has had to pay for getting Winston to support
them but it’s a pretty high price.

In effect the means
for a political party to remove a MP from their seat completely destroys the
link between the MP and their electorate because under MMP an electorate votes
for the party via the party vote and the MP via the electorate vote.

So if a MP is earnestly
representing their constituents but that position happens to disagree with the
party line then the party would have the means to remove them and keep the seat
while inserting a more compliant individual and bugger what the constituents
think.

One of the key
ideas of Democracy is that of representation, our MPs represent us in parliament
and if that ability is threatened or removed then an essential democratic link
is destroyed.

And if you think
that is not an issue think about the last time you spoke to your MP, they are
the human link, your voice in parliament, imagine if you and your electorate wanted
your MP to act on an issue important to you but the MP could/would act not due to the threat of
being removed from their seat by their party if they did so.

And again having
all mainstream print and electronic media in NZ under one roof is bad for
democracy as it’s hard to imagine a free and independent media when it’s all
coming from one source.

The argument from
NZME and Fairfax that this will be a good thing, and no one will lose their jobs is hard to imagine. Also hard to imagine is this merger doing anything positive for diversity of
political reportage in mainstream media when the mainstream media is all one blobulus entity desperately relying on advertiser dollar to keep afloat and an age of declining MSM media revenue.

Add to the fact
that one centralized media outlet is the hallmark of dictatorships and one
party states around the world and you can see why this merger is only good for
shareholders and not, in any way shape or form, the public, free speech or democracy.

Thank goodness that
the blogsphere has picked up on this as not only myself previously but others
like Pablo over at Kiwipolitico can see a major problem with this and its
deeply ironic that bloggers would be championing a diverse media landscape more than those MSM organisations themselves.

Jones always was a
dinosaur and a good example of why giving rich businessmen a public platform,
just because they are rich businessmen, is not a good idea, as Jones represents
the same kind of people I noted in my post about Don Brash, Colin Craig and JonKey a year ago; the kind of people who desperately want a time machine to get
back to the 1950s when Maori, minorities and anyone not a clone of them were silent and their desperately narrow set of (undemocratic) norms and values ruled.

And while the two
other issues in this post are clear threats to democracy so too is giving
people like Bob Jones a mouthpiece purely on the basis of his wealth, as just
like Trump and Oprah in the US, the idea of the rich and wealthy being any good
at leadership or running a democracy or having any desire for the country to be
democratic is dangerous to the extreme, just as the very basis of their wealth has
now become the very cancer eating away at democracy around the world.

The fact that Jones
has sought to sue the organizer of the petition shows exactly the same
mentality as Colin Craig, and the afore mentioned others, when their precious wealth and privilege
are threatened and while we can’t take away his wealth (yet) we could take away
his title and that would be just deserts for a man who once wrote a book called
“NZ the way I want it” where the way he wants it would be would be us all
kowtowing to scaly lizards like Bob Jones.

And the petition
has been extremely successful so far so it’s clear that again Jones, like
others of his kind, has lost touch with reality and has retreated into that
soft, safe, reality distorting, bubble that extreme wealth wraps around a person when the rest of the world disagree with their vile opinions.

All of these three things
are highly undemocratic and attack directly the idea of free speech and democracy in NZ and people
always worry about dictators taking over and NZ losing its freedoms as one
large grand actions (ala some takeover or coup like Smiths Dream) when instead its creeping moves
like these above that eat away at democracy and leave us exposed to the
predators.

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Itsa me!

Political pyromaniac; born again democrat; satirical connotator; fascist anarchist; relaxed conservative; focused liberal; consumer of truth, witch-hunter general of lies and putter of the praxis into perfect!